Notes from the Palm Beach Poetry Festival

I was excited to attend a workshop with Linda Gregg; before it began, I had a kind of expectation that something magical would happen. Of course, the reality of an event usually does not meet our preconceived notions.

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving.” –Lao Tzu

The magic has only recently begun to work in me, and it hasn’t been in the form of new poems. I have had to allow a bad cold and some low spirits to churn their way through my body and mind, but now, as I write these words, I’m beginning to feel like I can return to poetry and the magic I am experiencing in hindsight from Linda Gregg.

In an effort to share everything, to refrain from hoarding, I am giving you these notes I took during the workshop with Linda Gregg and also from the craft talks, interviews, and readings I attended. I haven’t framed these notes with any kind of commentary or explanations. If I have made a mistake in conveying Ms. Gregg’s ideas, these mistakes are my own.

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Notes from Linda Gregg’s Workshop and the Palm Beach Poetry Festival

Some of the concerns of Jack Gilbert’s poems: Serious, delight, dearness, God, nature, spirit, sacred. Most of what LG says about craft and aesthetics comes from Jack Gilbert.

Some exercises:

Read “Danse Russe” by William Carlos Williams in class and have the students answer the question “Is he happy?”

The building you’re in is on fire, and you won’t survive. You have fifteen minutes to write. You won’t survive, but somehow your writing will. Either give the time or act as if the person has only fifteen minutes. With this exercise you can’t be cute or funny. You have to take it seriously.

Cross-gender. Write a poem from the point of view of the opposite sex. Don’t use this poem as revenge. Imagine a situation and go deeply into it from the inside out.

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” It’s about thirteen ways the mind can see a single object. Every time you look at the thing you have to re-create what it is. LG gave the example of her art teacher telling her to paint the same lemons over and over, but every time she painted them she should re-invent what art is.

Seeing six things. Make a list of six things that you see for a week. Then choose two and write a poem. See if the things have resonance. One might ask, why does it have resonance? Why does it matter? Think of Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur.” You wake up to your life. We need to care how the reader experiences the poem–J. Gilbert did. The poem intuits how the reader will believe. Like “Danse Russe,” we believe in the images of the poem. Read “The Art of Finding.” http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19260

Write a poem as an animal. She read her poem “The copperhead.” It’s not a Disney cartoon. Inhabit the animal from the inside. As Jack Gilbert said, “Dig deeper. Go deeper.”

Write about a question you can’t possibly answer, like “What is the face of God?” Write a poem you can’t write. Take on the impossible.

Live with a tarot card with a week and then write a poem about it.

Find a scene like a German matchbook toy and then read her poem “The Beckett Kit.” In this poem the speaker describes placing the objects in the toy kit on a table. Then the poem turns on her observations of the things she has heard outside the window. Describe the toy and then make observations.

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Let the words mean what they mean, don’t turn them into plays on words. It gets to be too clever, distances the poem from what it wants to say. Stepping from stone to stone can be an adventure. Strategy can be fine, but use intuition also. Try to stay in the poem, not talk about the poem. She suggested reading Keats’s last poem to Fanny Brawne as an example of staying in the poem.

This Living Hand

This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood

So in my veins red life might stream again,

And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—

I hold it towards you.

–John Keats

Linda Gregg: “I sit down at night around 10:00 and ask the gods if they will help me with this. Or I walk up my father’s mountain if the poem doesn’t come. The brain doesn’t get to run the show, even though it’s there in the background.

Dismount: this is where the poem discovers something, usually at the end. If the poem is good, it knows where and when to end.

LG comes to the page in a prayerful state. Looks for the shapeliness of things. She told a story of Ezra Pound, about a cloth, a magnet, and metal shavings. If you put a cloth over a magnet and then sprinkle metal shavings on the cloth, the shavings will come together in the form of a rose.

The secret that no one knows about old people is that they are angry.

You have to be willing to give up your darlings.

Poems work on both horizontal and vertical planes. We have to be wiling to go deeper.

After you’ve written the poem, the poem has rights. Pay attention to what the poem says to you.

Keep the poem taut, like Ariadne’s thread.

Be careful with similes. We can let the image speak for itself.

LG is more intuitive, archetypal. She gets the poem on the page all in one move. Jack Gilbert was more strategic. He would walk around all week with them poem in his head and then use strategy when he wrote it.

The poem is not the dream. It’s the relationship between the poet and the dream. She told us a dream she had once of her mother. In the dream, LG is outside the room where her mother is, and she hears terrible screams. Either the mother is being attacked by a terrible beast, and LG needs to save her, or the mother has turned into a beast and if Gregg goes in the room the mother will tear her apart. Her poem “There She Is” came out of this dream.

If there’s no magic in a poem it’s probably not a poem. Magic changes one thing into something else. Think of Wakan Tanka. Doing the impossible. Take on a large subject. The brain will start to stutter [the mind will get out of the way and the self will rise].

“All the tired horses in the sun. How am I supposed to get any ridin’ done?” Bob Dylan song.

Messages are not poems. The magic is in the oblique telling. It can’t be done mechanically.

Writing is like a dreamcatcher: catching what is inside of you and putting it on the page. What does the poem want us to believe?

LG: “ I write plain because I want my poetry to live as long as Sappho’s”

Don’t make the reader do too much guesswork.

She compares her poems to Michelangelo’s sculpture. He wanted to make sculptures that could roll down a flight of stairs and nothing would break off.

What we need to do is find our poetry and just write it.

A poem is a boat and it’s only supposed to carry what can fit in one boat. Use economy of language.

“Calling”: I have to have a particular vision for what I want to write. Social Justice is important. Biblical verses that hold secular meaning.

Let the seams show in the poem, leave the meta-poetic in the poem, the why I am writing the poem.

Our quarrel with others is rhetoric. Our quarrel with ourselves is poetry–Yeats.

It’s not just about what literally happened but what we make of it.

To write is to re-create the truth, to establish it. What is true is the mind at this moment needing to make sense of the past. Mark Doty suggests that we begin to describe before making figurative sense of what we make of the description (she’s talking about her ekphrastic poems in Thrall).

Going back to a past that never really existed at all.

Flannery O’Connor: You can’t go home again because you have changed.

Language in the service of social justice: Josephine Jacobson, Jeff Brown–poetry dealing with social issues.

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Notes from Tim Siebles’s craft talk:

Nobody writes poetry so that no one will listen.

Poetry and metaphor create the kind of life that pushes back the shadows of distraction. Poetry allows us to see magic in action. It wakes us up out of our stupor.